165 The Pillow Book

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tenia
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Re: 165 The Pillow Book

#26 Post by tenia » Sat Jan 25, 2020 10:54 am

MichaelB wrote:
Sat Jan 25, 2020 10:29 am
I don't see why a "score for PQ" should be concerned with the aspect ratio
Because here, the amount of picture on screen seem to get small enough to make it hard judging if the picture is defined and detailed. I don't know the movie, so I guess it will depend on how much of it is presented that way.
MichaelB wrote:
Sat Jan 25, 2020 10:29 am
As for it looking "dated in some way", it's actually a very specific way.
I wrote "in some way" because I only had, so far, a quick glance at it and didn't want to be more forward than these early impressions. But yes, I suppose it just look dated like pre-existing HD masters can look, nothing less but nothing more.
MichaelB wrote:
Sat Jan 25, 2020 10:29 am
Unfortunately, the only way you're going to get around that - assuming the necessary material even survives at all - is to dig out all the original 35mm footage, scan it to 4K/6K and essentially reconstruct the film from scratch, an inconceivably expensive prospect given the likely commercial return.
I understand how expensive it might be, but it also just means what it means : this is sourced from an older HD master that has visible room for improvement and a newer restoration would be very likely to yield a better PQ, something that isn't specific to the movie.

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Re: 165 The Pillow Book

#27 Post by MichaelB » Sat Jan 25, 2020 11:07 am

You're calling for a full-blown reconstruction, not a restoration. Unless you go right back to 35mm basics and recomposite the entire thing from scratch, the side-effects of the mid-90s video technology will remain baked into the film.

A mere restoration involving, say, scanning the 35mm interpos (I assume there wasn't a conventional "original camera negative" for this film) and cleaning up the result might yield a very marginal improvement, but you'll still be inescapably faced with the original nature of the film's assembly.

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tenia
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Re: 165 The Pillow Book

#28 Post by tenia » Sat Jan 25, 2020 1:12 pm

Then yeah, a reconstruction.

NB : my remarks are purely technical. I understand the complexity of financing a complicated reconstruction / restoration, but then, it's the life of pretty much any movie on premium supports to be possibly dated-looking because of the use of an older HD master or being possibly, whatever the financial operation to support that, newly cared for and looking better.

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Re: 165 The Pillow Book

#29 Post by _shadow_ » Sat Jan 25, 2020 11:35 pm

The case of a movie with a dated HD scan that can be improved simply by returning to the master elements (a 35mm negative or interpositive) is entirely different than the situation with this film, where the master element is a dated HD scan.

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tenia
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Re: 165 The Pillow Book

#30 Post by tenia » Sun Jan 26, 2020 5:52 am

It might just be a semantic thing, but I'm unsure how many additionnal times I need to write that I perfectly understood what Michael meant about how the final form of the movie was conceived, which is indeed unusual.
It still doesn't prevent the fact that there is a way the movie could look better, whatever you call this way.

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Re: 165 The Pillow Book

#31 Post by MichaelB » Wed Jan 29, 2020 3:47 am

Mondo Digital:
In 2020, Indicator managed to easily blow away both of the prior Blu-rays with its own expanded edition that makes a very significant step to restoring the film to its intended presentation.

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Re: 165 The Pillow Book

#32 Post by MichaelB » Thu Feb 20, 2020 5:40 pm


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Re: 165 The Pillow Book

#33 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Apr 05, 2020 12:50 am

I’ve never been a huge Greenaway fan, often finding his stagey Brechtian style to be detaching and pretentious rather than engaging, but there’s something intriguing theoretically about what he does that keeps me coming back and re-evaluating his work with mixed success.

This was always one of my least favorites but a revisit was far more interesting for many of the reasons Colin mentioned in his excellent post on the first page of this thread. I appreciated the calligraphy and the fading text as Michael mentioned, which seem like small details but aided the transient flow of narrative progression to match the philosophical temperament. Here the distancing techniques captured my attention earnestly with their less predictable methods of visually inserting the frame with split screen images and dictating ideas in a meditative hazy manner that caused more surrender to curiosity in its assembly of culture and technique rather than frustration and condescension. I thought it was amusing that underneath a strange presentation of an eccentric narrative lived raw materials of unoriginal concepts: family history, jealousy, vengeance, misinterpretation, tragedy, identity exploration, etc. often in Shakespearean elicitations.

The fetishized exploration of sex and writing made me think of how both are forms of expression that stem from a personal place but that for eroticism to occur must be shared. The context of culture/individual perspective as a variable adds weight to the personal side and imbalances the protagonist away from connection due to her own standards and expectations, but this also represents the power that she desires in a relationship and can be looked at as a strength in refusing to settle. Her behavior indicates a specific need as well as the universal tendency to tire and seek new ancillary experiences, though part of what worked well here is the mystery of our bonds to literature and history, which she has been raised to identify with and has thus shaped her. In some ways this is similar to how many of us are conditioned into foundations for our identity development in early childhood that progress through youth, though the relationship to culture outside of a broad definition was unique and enough outside of my scope of knowledge to provoke interest rather than write off.

I can’t say I loved the movie, and only liked parts of it, but I wasn’t repelled for the same reasons I have been in the past by the filmmaker. There was more indifference to the content buried within the style, but the narrative process in moving everything along was never boring and I could see repeat viewings (and a re-evaluation of Greenaway’s work, which I plan to do soon) providing a better framework to appreciate this film.

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